Choking on our Excesses
by Rick Rockwell
Lately, I have to confess I’m a bit concerned about the state of 21st Century media.
The latest item to tickle my neurons and get me worrying was a cartoon by Daryl Cagle. The cartoon discusses the end of the newspaper and it has three wired teenagers cruising the ‘net for revealing pictures of Britney Spears and video of Saddam Hussein’s hanging.
Now, before you start fretting about me, let me assure you this won’t be a rant like the recent anti-blogging essays by George Will or Joseph Rago, an editor for the Wall Street Journal. No, I believe the democratic nature of the internet and how it is bringing down the hierarchy of managed news are good developments. I think blogging is wonderful. This puts a printing press into anyone’s hands. That’s revolutionary.
But as we start the communication revolution of the new millennium, the maladies of the last century are still with us.
I’m talking about the need to satisfy our cravings for sensation and conflict. This is why CNN is more like a Hearst newspaper than Ted Turner’s original vision these days. This is why CNN Headline News is not headline news at all but a list of opinionated talk shows. And this is why newspapers are over-run with gossip, speculation, opinion pieces, and wire copy that you can find everywhere. They can’t afford the reporting staff to dig up unique stories that aren’t part of the horde reporting trends that beset the media industry in the 1990s.
I left television news in the 1990s when I saw this infection spreading. The viral agents at the time were news consultants. They’d advise: “You need to do news about what people are talking about.” (And they’d use this supposedly cute acronym WPATA in all their references after that, encouraging news executives and news producers to use it too.) Now, this ran counter to my news judgment. If you devote reporting resources to maintaining presence on stories we already know about that equals regurgitation. You aren’t digging up new items, you are just keeping the old stories alive longer than their natural lifespans.
I blame this trend for the poor reporting that failed to dig deeply enough into the possible costs of the Iraq War before the invasion, and that skipped all the fine print in the Patriot Act before it was passed, or that missed any of the other under-reported stories that would have bolstered our democracy in these troubled times, instead of supporting the go-along-to-get-along attitude that turned large swaths of the media into lapdogs. Instead, the media were giving the public what they wanted, not what they needed to know.
But here is where the web is not the solution. Look at Technorati. Look at Digg. These aggregations of stories (which reflect what the blogosphere is writing, or which reflect the votes of internet users) show the same stories are the most popular: Britney sans underwear and the last gasp of Saddam. The BBC, CBS and other news organizations are creating web-based video programs to mirror the success of YouTube, and, of course, web users will determine the top stories for these projects. Stories like Brittany and Saddam will be popular there too. Our tastes are exactly the same as the teens in Cagle’s cartoon.
This is the ultimate triumph of the news consultants. Their curse is to keep us talking about what we already know.
Here’s the challenge: how do we start a new conversation and learn something for a change?
(Cartoon by London's Hugh MacLeod, the author of gapingvoid.com, used through a Creative Commons License.)
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4 comments:
Do you think the trend to cover the sensational is driven more by "what people are talking about" or by economic factors, namely trying to attract the younger audiences? I still struggle with the old chicken vs. egg question of whether the media reflect what people talk about or create what people talk about, although I lean more frequently to the latter.
Sensationalism sells and always has, as Hearst and Pulitzer would be glad to tell you if they could. It's also easier to digest. It's a lot easier to see Britney sans panties than to see explosions in Iraq (although one could argue we are becoming more desensitized to that by the second). It's also easier to digest because it makes us feel better about ourselves: "I thought I was insane, but that Britney has really lost it. I guess I am OK after all."
I agree wholeheartedly with you about the declining quality of news from mainstream sources. I'm just wondering aloud about what might be behind the downturn.
I’m glad you stopped here to comment because really this ties up several threads of conversation we’ve been having over at your place.
In the end, it is all economic. News organizations want to find the Holy Grail: an 18-26 demographic that really enjoys news. This opens up additional revenue streams for the product and insures decades of loyal consumers.
From my personal experience, only the very best news organizations have not been worried about this for the past generation. At great news organizations, you don’t worry about demographics because you paying attention solely to news content. The belief (and I have seen this work) is that if you put together a solid journalistic product then people will come to it. There is no need to manage story content for marketing because your overall product is strong enough to attract a considerable audience. And further, the philosophy is that if young people only like what is in the supermarket tabloids, then let them read those until it is time for them to find some news that matters.
But those who want to find that Holy Grail buy the snake oil of the
“what people are talking about” method. First, it is easier than doing real reporting and economically you can do it with fewer personnel.
Sensationalism, as you point out, will always be with us. Given the economic structures presently, news managers have a harder time fighting it or fighting media executives and consultants who push it. And in my opinion, the downward spiral of more sensationalism relates directly to the continued newsroom cuts that the media are experiencing so they can maintain their high profit margins.
In the end, great media outlets put out information that changes the conversation of what people are talking about because they reveal new information instead of dwelling on what is already known. But such organizations are on the endangered species list.
You mention the budget cuts newsrooms are experiencing, and I meant to touch on that in my last comment. I read in one of the many books I read for AU classes that gathering the sensational is often cheaper than gathering hard news, conducting investigative journalism and operating overseas or even out-of-state bureaus.
I just wrote a post on my blog about the startup Politico and how newspapers are pulling out of D.C. because there are too many cooks in the kitchen. In essence, it's like the old days, when news outlets paid the AP to cover the far away stuff and nearby reporters took care of the local news and sensational tidbits.
I agree that if you write it (it being good, solid journalism), they will come. I know people of my generation who regularly read the Wall Street Journal, NY Times and Washington Post even if just online. The point is they are 18-26 (OK maybe more like 30 now) and they are reading the "real" news.
I'd also like to add, in the interest of full disclosure, that I love reading celebrity gossip. When I need a break from the monotony or craziness of the day, I turn to washingtonpost.com's Celebritology. Entertainment news is news. The problem comes when you see real-life scenes like the one in The Office in which Jim asks Kelly what's been going on with her while he was at another branch of the company, and she rattles off a list of celebrity babies and marriages. Jim says, "That's great, but what's going on with you?" and she haughtily replies, "I just told you."
I love that -- WPATA. It explains so much, particularly the fascination with weather on TV. Call me old-fashioned, but all I'm interested in is whether it's going to rain. How many radars does one need for that?
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